When comparing Stencyl vs OpenBOR, the Slant community recommends Stencyl for most people. In the question“What are the best game engines for beginners and non-programmers?”Stencyl is ranked 7th while OpenBOR is ranked 28th. The most important reason people chose Stencyl is:

Power users can also write code in Haxe (similar to Actionscript 3) to create their own custom classes and extend the engine.

Pros

Pro

Haxe scripting available for advanced users

Power users can also write code in Haxe (similar to Actionscript 3) to create their own custom classes and extend the engine.

Pro

Cross-Platform

Publish iOS, Android, Flash, Windows and Mac games without code.

Pro

No coding required, great drag & drop interface

Visual scripting in Stencyl is based on the MIT Scratch project, which was designed to teach programming. Script elements fit together like puzzle pieces, ensuring that data and function types cannot be mismatched.

Pro

Great performance on every platform

Stencyl exports your games to native code so they have great performance on every platform.

Pro

The original concept for Ghost Song was created using Stencyl

The original concept for Ghost Song was created using Stencyl 3.x

Pro

With a bit of tweaking, it's also possible to create a platformer

It's possible for a non-programmer who is comfortable with text-based designing to tweak the engine in order to create a platformer. Almost all the parameters needed can be found in the OpenBOR wiki, so it's easy to find anything a new developer needs.

Pro

Great genre-specific engine

OpenBOR can quickly help create a good Beat-Em-Up game without programming.

Pro

Great, supportive community

OpenBOR community is highly active and very helpful.

Cons

Con

Only available via subscription

There should be an option to buy it outright, especially considering it is written by a one man team....this is not exactly an Adobe level enterprise with shareholders, so there is no excuse!

Con

It was left in the era of Flash games

It needs much to improve for mobile games, it was left in the era of Flash games. In Android you can not even put the native keyboard, you can not access things like native camera, GPS or native text input.

Con

Not a powerful engine

Should be used for basic games only.

Con

Slow Release Cycle

Con

Tile system is somewhat inflexible

Con

Text-based parametric editing

Heavy reliance on text-editing. No visual editor to edit characters and levels (although there are a few community-built ones that do the job).